Unpacking the Boxes

by Donald Hall (Houghton Mifflin; $24)

Most memoirs begin with a birth, but Hall’s starts with another sort of becoming: “At fourteen I decided to spend my life writing poetry, which is what I have done.” Soon Hall moves from suburban Connecticut, where “nothing happened,” to Exeter, Harvard, and Oxford, his time line marked indelibly by books and illnesses. Hall’s direct tone softens the extraordinariness of his life. Frank O’Hara, John Ashbery, and Adrienne Rich are school chums; literary successes, such as his appointment as Poet Laureate, are presented without garnish. The final two chapters, which mourn Hall’s late wife, Jane Kenyon, and the fact of aging, are more emotionally wrought. Here, where the “fleshy museum of memory” is most acute, Hall affectingly navigates the tumult. In old age, his directness is part modesty and part wryness. When asked, at a Library of Congress dinner, the subject of his writing, he replies, “Love, death, and New Hampshire.” ♦